James Critchlow

ven before the official
breakup of the Soviet Union
in December 1991, Central
Asians began to reclaim
their history. In Alma-Ata,

capital of Kazakhstan, for example, civic leaders changed the name of one of their major thoroughfares from Gorky Street to Jibek Joly-Kazakh for what English speakers call the "Great Silk Road," the fabled trade route that ran through Central Asia in ancient times. The renaming was but one of countless syrn- bolic gestures in a process th...